Pioneering Southland trust plans return
A Southland charity that pioneered an innovative approach to early childhood care has had to close its doors after a bid for funding from central government was unsuccessful but it’s not over yet for the charity, reports.
At 16 years old, Shanaya McLaren-Marsh was told she was eight months pregnant. The doctor told her the baby was only three weeks away.
Shanaya and her partner Sean Windle, then 20, were staring parenthood straight down the barrel. ‘‘It was scary,’’ Shanaya said. Fast-forward a year and their baby, Bella-Rose, is a healthy, bubbly girl.
Escaping her parents’ gaze for a minute, Bella-Rose wanders into the kitchen and opens a cupboard door. Her mother picks her up and carries her back to the lounge.
Shanaya recalls her first stay at the 1000 Days Trust house. It was in September last year.
For a week they lived in the house and had their daily needs taken care of by staff so they could spend time with their new baby.
While bonding with baby, staff also taught them some basic life skills and gave them parenting advice.
‘‘They basically helped with everything you needed to know,’’ Shanaya said.
She learnt how to make lasagne, bacon and egg pie, apple crumble and black doris pudding. ‘‘I do cooking quite a bit now.’’
They helped Sean get into an adult literacy course so he could get his driver’s licence and showed him how to make a CV.
Shanaya’s mum Angelina said the time the couple spent in the house made a huge difference to their confidence as parents.
‘‘It was good thing for them to go there and to be mum and dad to their baby and me sort of be out of the picture for a wee bit.’’
‘‘They’ve grown a lot and got a lot more confident with BellaRose.’’
Shanaya and Sean are one of about 60 families the trust has helped since 2015.
The point of difference from other services offered is that families are taken in to a house where they take part in a five-day intensive intervention programme.
Staff work closely with families for several weeks before their stay to identify their needs and to design their own plan to help the families build a stronger relationship with their babies.
The trust was formed in 2011 by several Southland medical professionals who saw a gap in social services where vulnerable children were not getting the support they needed.
One of the trust’s founders, paediatrician Dr Viliame Sotutu, said when he worked at Southland Hospital as a community paediatrician, children were coming time and time again into social services and at no stage were professionals dealing with several other issues going on in the background.
Sotutu was also working with Child, Youth and Family providing confidential assessments of children referred to the agency.
‘‘I was seeing awful stuff as part of my regular work and so I was driven by the desire to prevent the kind of stuff from happening that I was seeing.’’
Social services did a fantastic job that worked for the vast majority of the population, but for a proportion their issues were too complex for social service providers and medical professionals to sort out, Sotutu said.
Sotutu became aware that early adversity had a raft of long-term impacts on a child’s life.
‘‘The relationship between a baby and its parents is one of the key factors for buffering the effects of early adversity.’’
Sotutu and his peers then formed the 1000 Days Trust, built on the premise that the first 1000 days of a child’s life from conception are critical to the development for a child.
What they pioneered was a pilot programme where a team of professionals work with families to provide a stable, nurturing environment to give the children the best start at life.
The trust secured a house where families could stay, spending a week at a time with them.
‘‘We needed to bring people out of potentially dysfunctional and very stressful homes into a place where they could rest, catch their breath and be relieved of a whole bunch of competing distractions and where we could just do life with them and work with them.’’
Families were often motivated more than ever by the arrival of a new child and were keen to do things differently, so staff would try to exploit that readiness for change to make some decisions that would improve the family setting and allow these people to develop platform on which they will go for the future, Sotutu said.
There was no other service providing the same support and many of the existing services had very narrow criteria for access to them, he said.
‘‘We wanted to have the door wide open, to have people come in who had needs based on a whole broad range of vulnerabilities.’’
The trust developed good relationships with other service providers in Southland so they were able to model something about healthy relationships to the families, but also to provide ongoing support once families left the house, Sotutu said.
Unable to secure funding from central government to continue for a long period, the pilot has come to an end, but the trust is hopeful it can consolidate its findings from the programme and present a case for further funding.
The trust only ever had funding for short periods of time, but what they were trying to do was to refine the model, Sotutu said
‘‘Understandably, the government is going to want to commit to something where it’s got some evidence rather than just a bunch of enthusiastic and passionate claims about what we are purporting to do, and so I think it’s actually a reasonable and understandable thing that we haven’t been able to get big funding to take this to the next stage.’’
Although the trust has lost funding at this time, Sotutu said there is the potential to get things up and running again.
‘‘We can actually make a massive difference through a substantial early investment and it requires a decent amount of work at the front end, but the merits and benefits downstream will be massive.’’
Trust chairwoman Prue Halstead said the decision to bring the pilot to an end was a difficult one, but the right move.
‘‘As responsible trustees we couldn’t continue with the pilot without knowing there was going to be future funding.’’
During the next few months the trust would continue talking to funders, but was also looking at other ways to secure funding that did not keep the trust locked into a funding cycle that was crippling, she said.
‘‘We’re one small trust set up in Southland and so trying to raise our profile nationally to secure funding has been a challenge.’’
The trust’s aim was to be up and running again with a residence early next year, Halstead said.
She estimated it cost $500,000 a year to run the house but that figure would be reviewed as the trust evaluated its services.
Trustee Aimee Kaio said it was always going to be difficult going to funders as they were trying to create a model of true early intervention that was not proven before in New Zealand, or elsewhere in the world.
The trust had operated on piecemeal funding to date from a number sources including principal funder Te Putahitanga, Ngai Tahu, The Community Trust of Southland, Invercargill Licensing Trust. and the Southern Trust.
‘‘We’re just a little ahead of the game.’’
They knew the model worked. Feedback from community providers, referrers and the families themselves validated that the model worked.
Three communities from throughout the country had followed the progress of the trust and were looking at implementing the same sort of programme Southland tried, Kaio said.
‘‘If we package it up quite succinctly and we can hand it over and see where these communities get to, I think that will also prove that it is a replicable model.’’
1000 Days Trust navigator Megan Pearson said bringing Shanaya and Sean into the house was about giving them the opportunity to realise they could be good parents.
At the start, Shanaya did not think she could be a parent but, once she got over the initial shock and came to terms with everything she needed, the trust was there to support her, Pearson said.
‘‘She knew she wanted better than what she had, so she wanted to go back to school.’’
Sean now has his licence and wants to study a mechanics course at the Southern Institute of Technology, Pearson said.
It was about giving them the opportunities to say they can do it and providing them with encouragement, pearson said.